Elise Joshi was scrolling through Twitter’s standard rage ace late one February evening when she had a Tweet that annoyed her enough to take action. Starbucks, the supposedly progressive coffee chain, had just fired seven employees for trying to unionize at a store in Memphis, Tennessee. (Starbucks told CNN the layoffs weren’t retaliatory, but the workers claimed otherwise.) Joshi, 21, immediately started a group chat with two fellow union sympathizers. “We could find the Starbucks applications there and tell the people to blow it up with fakes,” she texted.
“That’s something we can do,” replied Sean Wiggs, a computer engineering student. He knew because he had done it before. Within two hours, Wiggs coded a script that allowed users to automatically submit a pile of fake job applications to replace the Starbucks employees, using a temporary email service to generate disposable email addresses. Twenty-one-year-old coder Sofia Ongele created a website called Change Is Brewing and filled it with simple instructions on how to use the script, which users could run in a browser tab. (She had coded a similar website in January to spam Glenn Youngkin’s critical-racing theory tipline from the governor of Virginia with Bee Movie lyrics.) The trio started distributing the site on TikTok and reposted them on their social media channels. .
“It would be a real shame if people used the website and let Starbucks know that unions are good and they shouldn’t fire employees for trying to unionize,” Ongele told her 285,000 TikTok followers. “The link may or may not be in my bio.”
Ongele’s brash tone reflects the style of many of the posts by Gen-Z for Change, a coalition of progressive digital activists. Joshi serves as the organization’s operations director, Ongele as digital strategy coordinator and Wiggs as digital strategy officer. The group, dubbed the “TikTok Army of the Progressive Movement,” has racked up a total of 540 million followers on social media, “more views than CNN, MSNBC and Fox News,” as they like to put it. Like-minded groups shout for airtime on their megaphones, the landing of Gen-Z for Change a White House briefing on the war in Ukraine, and a parody of said briefing on Saturday Night Live†
Launched in 2020, the group changed its original name, TikTok for Biden, after the president’s inauguration. The makeover also marked a broader remit, with content creators trumpeting about issues from climate change to foreign relations. In the past few months, members have begun to turn their attention to the labor movement. After Starbucks, they spammed the Kroger supermarket Ralph’s, which posted temporary replacement jobs after union workers there authorized a strike. Then they turn their sights to Amazon.
Since they launched Change Is Brewing, the trio say 140,000 people have flooded the application pool for Starbucks’ Memphis store and another location in Buffalo, which has also seen union workers fired. When Starbucks last week posted a job for a director of corporate lawyers with experience in “strike emergency planning,” organizers gathered their followers, who submitted 40,000 false applications. Shortly afterwards, the company deleted the post. Starbucks did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
